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Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

danielmiessler.com

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Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#221

Post by jitl »

astrange wrote: post #128
barkingcat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think while yes, UI changes does take a lot of care, I think it is a matter of "Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces." If one of the richest companies on the planet can't pay to hire good designers, and just pay to buyout a whole ecosystem (ie what they did with AMP), then no one can. Rather, I think your points aside, it's a matter of executive direction and attention. Google executives d…

Do they even know it’s bad? Google has approximately no way to report issues in anything. I assume they have telemetry for some things. Whenever I sign into Hangouts I have to report hundreds of porn spam chats I’ve been added to - they should be seeing that. Aren’t doing anything about it though.

I find feedback buttons on most Google properties actually

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#222

Post by philsnow »

twblalock wrote: post #157
deckard1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google. Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is…

> you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google. It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder). At the…

> conversation threading that actually works

Gmail's "threading" is probably its worst sin (beating out its weird IMAP interface). When I started using Gmail, my other mail client was mutt, but every other client at the time showed replies to email threads properly as a tree.

As an aside, you could argue that email conversations should look like a DAG (since you could totally quote multiple emails and have multiple In-Reply-To headers, why not) but I'm not aware of any clients that did that.

Gmail went a third way, completely linearizing a thread into a "conversation". This view makes it harder to have discourse over email: if you want to make sure to split a conversation and have both forks get addressed, you have to change the subject line to un-thread replies to your message.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#223

Post by zentiggr »

mdwelsh wrote: post #14

I used to work at Google, as an engineering director on the Chrome Mobile team. While I agree that the UX of many Google products needs fixing, it's not just a simple matter of "Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces." The article misses a really important point that you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback. Startups like Notion…

But the overall history of Google UX reads like:

- new idea rolls out with a kickass set of options, settings, features

- after some arbitrary time of collecting initial users (and one presumes feedback in some form) an aribtrary set of very useful features gets written out as part of a revamping / streamlining / brainfart of global proportions.

- everyone that hasn't signed on to that flavor of UX koolaid is left out in the cold because whatever got cut is NEVER EVER coming back no matter how many people want it back.

- everyone convinced to jump on the Google platform is condemned to use only what they are given, never anything better.

My feelings about this are strongly colored by the fiasco of the GMail interface losing the simple, basic, core option of looking at emails oldest first or newest first. All these years later I still can't understand why some cabal decided that we ALL only needed newest first regardless of any preferences stated everywhere else in the entire internet.

But I long ago lost all confidence that anyone at Google listens to outside feedback about anything. I have a hard time believing that anyone actually dogfoods honestly.

I assume the engineering teams do circlejerks of "what do we want this to do" - "ok give the world whatever we decided and screw anyone's ideas how else it could work".

> the challenges of bringing all of the existing users over to the new experience are very real

I can't remember any time that a new feature rollout didn't subtract as much usefulness as it may have added. It's never "we want this to do this for you as well", it's "we've decided that this is how it should work, and you'll just have to get used to our own way of doing it if you want to keep using it. Sorry not sorry."

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#224

Post by ryantgtg »

wcarron wrote: post #70
polishdude20 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of email client would you recommend instead?

I actually just began the process of migrating away from Google about two weeks ago. I chose FastMail for my new email provider. It's $5/mo, but honestly, I'm fine paying that, solely to get Google out of my emails. I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar…

My NYTimes sub goes to my gmail, and then it forwards to my fastmail (I rarely need to check my gmail).

I was unable to sign up for an Etsy account with Fastmail. They only acknowledge the majors. But I was able to sign up with gmail and then promptly change it to fastmail. Really sophisticated opsec on their part.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#225

Post by xg15 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #88
bengale wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression they don’t care if you enjoy using it, just that you are using it so they can continue to capture the data. They know most people aren’t going anywhere.

Well, if engagement is measured by time in the system, then a bad UI/UX can help that measure. If things move around inside an app frequently enough, I'm forced to spend more time using it because I on longer know how (Google Finance changed yet again a few weeks ago on me). If they hold an outsized share of the market + momentum from people having used their services for (now) 20+ years, then they can get away with…

This sounds cynical, but I wonder if this is actually the case to some extent. If you only look at engagement metrics, then those engagement metrics will be optimised, no matter how. Cobra effect and all that.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#226

Post by zentiggr »

catwind7 wrote: post #190
caminocorner wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback. Of course there is, therre's always someone who will be upset. The problem is they've kept making it worse and worse to unanimous dissent, despite any research or the well paid "very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers."

> The problem is they've kept making it worse and worse to unanimous dissent Where's your data on "unanimous dissent"? Also, there's often a silent majority of your products where people are totally happy with it and have zero complaints. You don't want to accidentally cater to the loud minority. It's not as simple as saying "well, someones gonna be upset but we should do it anyway because we know better". Knowing ex…

> It's not as simple as saying "well, someones gonna be upset but we should do it anyway because we know better".

Yeah, it is. That's exactly what Google does. All the time.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#227

Post by rdsubhas »

It's not just horrible UI/UX. Google atleast used to be known for their aggressive focus on engineering performance & latency.

Anyone remembers when Google bought the Chromium team, Chrome was first launched, and it was lauded as the fastest and lightest browser? Fast forward today, and Chrome is the epitome of sluggishness, a godzilla of a browser. Gmail? Same – horrible, bloated, slow. Google G-Suite? Same. Android? Symbol of inefficiency, barely usable after throwing tens of gigs of RAM, CPU and huge batteries. Google Cloud Console? Piles of steaming slow foam.

It's almost as if, show me a product that Google does that is fast today, other than the bare minimum Google home page search box.

On one hand, they're facing erosion of product management. On the other hand, it's no longer an Engineering-driven company in the sense their engineering is not able to drive atleast that UI/UX to work performant.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#228

Post by andromeduck »

robertlagrant wrote: post #124
metalliqaz wrote: post #78

The new icons for their apps on Android are terribad. They are all the same colors. Now the photos app icon looks the same as the maps app icon, which causes me to confuse the two when I only give a quick glance. Gmail used to be red, now I have trouble finding it among all their other crap. WTF Google???

I group apps by functional area, so this actually hasn't affected me. But I can imagine if you group apps by brand for some reason then it'd be rather difficult to tell them apart!

I group apps by frequency of access and it's pretty terrible as it seems like every app icon nowadays is just a logo on a bedsheet.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#229

Post by ryantgtg »

kerng wrote: post #59
polishdude20 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of email client would you recommend instead?

I cant believe I'm saying this but Outlook. I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most. Maybe for people tha…

I just changed from a job that used GSuite to one that uses Office 365. I think Outlook is total garbage. The desktop client especially, and the website is barely an improvement. I've gotten used to it in the last month, but I still think the threading UX (my main gripe at this point) is really poor.

Maybe the lesson here is that if you use one of them for years, then the other seems really bad.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#230

Post by birdsbirdsbirds »

mdwelsh wrote: post #14

I used to work at Google, as an engineering director on the Chrome Mobile team. While I agree that the UX of many Google products needs fixing, it's not just a simple matter of "Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces." The article misses a really important point that you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback. Startups like Notion…

> Startups like Notion have a great deal of flexibility to tweak and innovate on their UX

Isn't it the other way round? For small start-ups, making disruptive changes is dangerous because losing important customers would kill the company whereas Google has the momentum to establish any change they want to make.

Start-ups still make disruptive changes because venture capital is eager to win big.

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